Worried About the Intellectual Climate

Under the slogan "I'm more worried about the intellectual climate", a typical confusionist group called Demand Debate has sprung up to treat CO2 as an accused defendant entitled to the best lawyers it can afford.

Well, as it happens, I'm more worried about the intellectual climate, too. Solving climate change alone is not enough. We will have to be very smart and take the best of everyone's thoughts and everyone's abilities and everyone's actions to resolve our problems to avoid severe setbacks in the next couple of centuries. We really need to know how to think more effectively, collectively.

So how well is "Demand Debate" living up to its declared intent to worry about the intellectual climate? This well:

DemandDebate.com is surveying climate experts about climate change.
It would be terrific if you could take a few moments to
participate. Please reply to this e-mail by answering the questions
below. Simply place an "X" in the box that best represents your view.
Responses will remain confidential. If you have any questions, please
e-mail steve@demanddebate.com


Question #1. Which best describes the reason(s) for climate change?

[ ] Human activity is the principal driver of climate change.
[ ] Human activity drives climate change, but natural variability
is also important.
[ ] Natural variability drives climate change, but human activity
is also important.
[ ] Natural variability is the principal driver of climate change.
[ ] No opinion.

Apolitical expert: On what time scale would that be? Of course natural variability has been dominant over billions of years. It's a vague question, but 'natural variability' is probably best.

Non-expert reader: See, experts don't believe that "global warming" is man-made.

Question #2. Which best describes the role of manmade CO2 emissions
in climate change?

[ ] Manmade CO2 emissions are the principal driver of climate change.
[ ] Manmade CO2 emissions drive climate change, but other natural
and human-related factors are also important.
[ ] Other natural and/or human-related factors drive climate
change, but manmade CO2 emissions are important.
[ ] Other natural and/or human-related factors are the principal
drivers of climate change.
[ ] No opinion.

Apolitical expert: Easy one. the second choice.

Non-expert reader: They have so many theories, they don't know anything!

Question #3. Which best describes the impact on global climate of
controlling manmade CO2 emissions?

[ ] Limiting manmade CO2 emissions would have a strong impact.
[ ] Limiting manmade CO2 emissions would have some impact.
[ ] Limiting manmade CO2 emissions would have no impact.
[ ] It would be impossible to discern the impact.
[ ] No opinion.

Apolitical expert: On what time scale? It may be difficult to discern the impact of a responsible policy for a considerable time.

Non-expert reader: Hah! The experts think any policy change is futile!

Question #4. Current mean global temperature is:

[ ] Unprecedentedly warm and getting warmer.
[ ] Within natural variability but moving to unprecedentedly warmer
levels.
[ ] Within natural variability and stable.
[ ] Not a useful metric.
[ ] No opinion.

Apolitical expert: On what time scale? Certainly it was much warmer in the Eocene. Hopefully we'll be able to put the brakes on before THAT happens! Actually I can't agree with any of these choices.

Non-expert reader: See! It's all cycles.

Question #5. The climatic impacts of a mean global global temperature
that is 1-degree Celsius warmer than today are:

[ ] Undesirable.
[ ] Desirable.
[ ] Desirable for some and undesirable for others.
[ ] Too difficult to assess.
[ ] No opinion.

Apolitical expert: Oh that's a small change. It would be mixed.

Non-expert reader: So warming doesn't even matter!

Question #6. The ideal global climate is...

[ ] Warmer than the present.
[ ] Cooler than the present.
[ ] Occurring today.
[ ] There is no such thing as an "ideal" global climate.
[ ] No opinion.

Apolitical expert: Oh, come one. Ideal for what purpose?

Non-expert reader: So lots of experts don't think change is bad at all!

Thank you for your response. Please return this e-mail to

Steven Milloy
Executive Director, DemandDebate.com

Aha, that explains it...

These questions are carefully chosen to have different meaning in formal and informal discourse. They are slimy tricks.

I suppose we will need to watch for this "survey", but everyone should notice these are tricks with language intended to subvert serious conversation. One can easily and consistently choose all of the positions that Milloy wants one to choose while still favoring vigorous reduction in emissions of greenhouse gases.

With thanks to Dr. A. for the forward.

Update: Inel has an excellent article about the nine 'errors' that also addresses tricks with language and casual impression.

Gravityism

This is fascinating.

Via Pharyngula, still more shocking evidence of dogmatic closedmindedness in science. An expose' will be released as a documentary film next winter, showing how:

a long line of physicists, astronomers, chemists and philosophers ... have had their reputations destroyed and their careers ruined by a scientific establishment that allows absolutely no dissent from Isaac Newton's theory of natural forces causing attraction between bodies of mass.

A news report on the alternative hypothesis appeared in a renowned publication some months ago.

About China, for Blog Action Day

Today, according to blogger.com, is "blog action day", and we should blog about"the environment", which seems to me nothing more than saying "nonfiction". Eager to comply, though, I thought I'd mention something not directly climate-related which nevertheless says something about our quandary.

We will need the Chinese to participate in fixing our global problems, but the Chinese do not seem inclined to take sustainability seriously. The lengthy article is third in a series of five on China's environmental crisis. Quoting:

Toxic cyanobacteria, commonly referred to as pond scum, turned the big lake fluorescent green. The stench of decay choked anyone who came within a mile of its shores. At least two million people who live amid the canals, rice paddies and chemical plants around the lake had to stop drinking or cooking with their main source of water.

The outbreak confirmed the claims of a crusading peasant, Wu Lihong, who protested for more than a decade that the region’s thriving chemical industry, and its powerful friends in the local government, were destroying one of China’s ecological treasures.

Mr. Wu, however, bore silent witness. Shortly before the algae crisis erupted in May, the authorities here in his hometown arrested him. In mid-August, with a fetid smell still wafting off the lake, a local court sentenced him to three years on an alchemy of charges that smacked of official retribution.

Eight 'errors' and an editing error

Regarding the Burton judgment about An Inconvenient Truth

I've watched the relevant scenes, and though I find the polar bear sequence a bit silly, I can find nothing whatsoever wrong with what Gore says in substance or in emphasis in eight of the nine cases.

The troublesome case is where Gore says:

"that's why the citizens of these Pacific nations have all had to evacuate to New Zealand"

There is certainly no case where all the inhabitants of a nation have evacuated, to date, although the prospect does not seem remote. This astonishing fact does not seem to faze the critics of the movie in the least.

Now, I'd like to point out that 'all' is a word used very commonly and casually in middle-south educated language. It is used for emphasis, not as a logical qualifier. Indeed in another scene, Gore in discussing ice albedo speaks of the reflection of "all of that energy, over 90%". It's used as a term of informal emphasis.

Arguably, there is some subset of Pacific Islanders who have 'all evacuated' in the loose, emphatic sense of 'all'. I can certainly imagine a context in which the statement, with a little slack for Gore's vernacular, would be reasonable.

That said, the sentence and the accompanying photograph seems spliced loosely into a discussion of sea level rise. It appears without context or preparation. It appears a sort of an orphan clip.

I blame bad film editing. We can't really know exactly what Mr Gore said about that matter from the context of the film, as it was almost certainly dropped in out of context. In at least that sense, it is an error in the film.

The polar bear case, it seems, can be argued.

The others are simply slam dunks in Gore's favor. Other than that out-of-context evacuation comment, I can see nothing wrong with what Mr. Gore said or how the film presented it.

Update: RealClimate comes to exactly the same conclusion I did.

Innocence by association

Check the Apple homepage today.

Lomborg gets silly

Lomborg is quoted among an interesting list of reactions to the Nobel.

Awarding it to Al Gore cannot be seen as anything other than a political statement. Awarding it to the IPCC is well-founded. [Gore's film The Inconvenient Truth has] some very obvious mistakes, like the argument that we're going to see 6m of sea-level rise.

They [the Nobel committee] have a unique platform in getting people's attention on this issue, and I regret they have used it to make a political statement.

Never mind the odd choice of purported error for now.

I am reminded of the scene in the Monty Python film Life of Brian, where the crowd demands of Brian's mum whether she is a virgin, insisting it "isn't a personal question". How, exactly, could a peace prize not be a political statement?

Detailed Geography of Ice Retreat

A nicer map than I have seen previously showing the season's record sea ice retreat is available at NASA's Earth Observatory site.

History of AGW Consensus by Mashey

In a comment on another thread, John Mashey offers a detailed and interesting view of the history of the AGW consensus that I thought deserves highlighting.

===================

1) A general process and chronology covers a number of cases (not all), so I'll do that first, and then answer the specific question about consensus in global warming.

• a) First, nobody really knows.
• b) People start doing serious studies, and they don't all agree, but evidence starts to pile up around some hypothesis on its way to being a theory.
• c) As elements of a hypothesis get established, people stop arguing about them, but argue about other elements.
• d) At some point, some things are so well-accepted that almost no one doing serious research and doing peer-reviewed publication argues with it. I say almost no one, because there are always a few dissenters, sometimes even quite distinguished ones.

But at that point, the consensus is as strong as it ever gets in science, and of course, by then it's wired into textbooks with few if any caveats. Researchers don't normally run around proclaiming consensus all over the place, because by the time it is a consensus, it's obvious, so who cares? Only if new data appears that truly contradicts the consensus does anyone get excited - of course, overturning a consensus with a new hypothesis that gets confirmed ... is a giant win for a scientist.

Well, that applies to most scientific arguments ... EXCEPT:

2) Sometimes people find the resulting consensus undesirable for extra-science reasons:

• a) religious
• b) economic
• c) ideological/political
• or combinations.

and in this case, a common strategy is to say: "there's still a lot of argument" or "teach the controversy", and these have tended to use the small number of scientists who dissent plus a lot of PR, not to change the science, but to create doubt in the public.

For example:

• - Evolution vs creationism/intelligent design, going on for a long time. (a)
• - Medical science versus smoking and then second round, secondhand smoke. (b) If you can find Allan M. Brandt's "The Cigarette Century" you can learn all about the tactics used to obfuscate the science, and it's the best case, because unlike almost any other case, there is this huge database of public records of internal documents.

PR agencies honed tactics including use of the few dissenting scientists, creation of captive scientific-sounding front organizations (like TIRC, or later, TASSC - The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition), creating doubt, etc.
(As an example of a dissenter, the great statistician Sir Ronald Fisher disbelieved the smoking-disease linkage right up to his death in 1962, long after there was very powerful evidence.)

A bunch of thinktanks came into existence, learned the skills with tobacco, and then applied them later to:

• - ozone depletion vs CFCs (b,(c))
• - other environmental regulations vs business interests (b, (c))

and of course,

• - global warming vs fossil fuel (b, (c)

The (b, (c)) means that the primary impetus and funding tends to be (b), but there is often an ideological connection (c), which for these cases tends to have certain sorts of current-conservative and/or extreme libertarian leanings. I.e., this is not isomorphic with the Republican Party, but tends to be closely tied there at the moment.
Some of this dates to Frank Luntz, an influential pollster: see Wikipedia entry and the parts of LuntzSpeak, especially:
http://www.luntzspeak.com/memo4.html

Hence there is: George C. Marshall Institute, SEPP, CEI, AEI, Heartland, Frontiers of Freedom, SPPI, Fraser Institute (Canada), (and more) mostly in USA, and concentrated around Washington, DC, and with a lot of overlapping participants, often with funding from tobacco companies, very-conservative foundations, ExxonMobil, and coal companies.

3) In any of these, we get into a state where the scientists think there is a strong consensus about something, and will say so if asked, but are working on areas that are in doubt. Papers do not waste words reaffirming the consensus, i.e., very few biologists waste words confirming evolution.

However, the other side constantly attacks the consensus, trying to sow doubt among the public, "teach the controversy" etc. Fighting with this is generally a thankless task for most scientists, as Michael says.

Note that this very different from a real scientific argument, like the multiple-decades-long fight over continental drift, or the shorter fight over the causes of ulcers.

When somebody says there is a consensus, it's not usually that they're trying to close off scientific debate or win an argument, it's just an observation of fact, as seen in the rear-view mirror! Scientists I've talked with (a lot, over 40 years, on many different topics) usually calibrate what they say with uncertainty levels.

Sometimes, the obfuscation strategy backfires into a court case like "Kitzmiller v Dover Area School District", which is one the Discovery Institute did not want to fight, and in which the dissenter witnesses, under oath, got slaughtered in court in front of a conservative, but honest judge John Jones III.

4) AGW consensus.

Assuming this means: "The recent (say since 1975) rise in temperatures is mostly caused by humans, especially by adding GHGs to the atmosphere." I think that has actually been mostly in place (scientifically) before 1990, although as always, people argue about the details.

REPUBLICAN President George H. W. Bush said, in:
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=17765
"President Bush announced today that the United States has agreed with other industrialized nations that stabilization of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions should be achieved as soon as possible." that was 1989.

The more it looked like people might actually do something to conserve fossil-fuels, and the stronger the statements got by the IPCC, the louder the anti-AGW PR got, and for whatever reason, some parts of the Republican party took a distinct anti-science turn (see Chris Mooney's book "The Republican War on Science."

5) At the February 2004 AAAS meeting, the (prestigious) George Sarton Award lecture was "The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change: How Do We Know We're Not Wrong?" of which you can find a slightly-updated version at:
www.ametsoc.org/atmospolicy/Presentations/Oreskes%20Presentation%20for%20Web.pdf

This was given by UCSD Professor Naomi Oreskes, who is a well-published, award-winning geoscientist and science historian, and it is well worth reading.

Naomi's original talk mentioned a quick experiment she had done, which was searching the ISI Web of Science for "global climate change" in papers published 1993-2003 and looking at abstracts and assessing them, expecting to see when and how the consensus got established, and was surprised to find that the consensus was already there.

However, this got a strong audience response, and she ended up doing a 1-page essay for Dec 2004 Science (which does not give out pages casually):
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1686

Bennie Peiser (a UK Social anthropologist!) wrote a letter to Science (not accepted) attacking these results, in 2005. It turned out that he simply lacked the expertise, and this was refuted, rather thoroughly.
http://timlambert.org/2005/05/peiser/

The other side constantly raises doubts about the consensus, and often attacks Oreskes, sometimes quite personally via threatening letters.

The latest one is a bizarre combination of a Britsh Lord Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount of Brenchley, a London endocrinologist, Klaus-Martin Schulte, who wrote an article (not yet published) that tried to refute Oreskes and teh consensus again. Even without being published, it managed to generate:

Google: less than half published scientists endorse global warming
--> 700,000 hits

I.e., regardless of the truth, the desired publicity was accomplished, using a well-tuned PR machine centered in Washington, DC.

There also turned out to be plagiarism, threats of lawsuits, letters sent to Oreskes' Chancellor and then publicized via Business Wire, etc, etc.

So: there is a large machine crying "no consensus, there is doubt" which is perfectly happy to publicize
- an indirect reference to a paper by an endocrinologist
- who turns out to be fairly clueless about climate science,
- and whose paper couldn't even get published in the poorly-regarded journal to which it had been submitted.

This story is spread across various blogs, but some key ones are:
http://scienceblogs.com/strangerfruit/2007/08/oreskes_responds_to_schulte.php
http://scienceblogs.com/strangerfruit/2007/09/ah_another_day_in_denialism_la.php
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2007/09/oreskes_replies_to_schulte_1.php
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2007/09/schulte_replies_to_oreskes.php

===

Note that the above, except for the italicized intro, was entirely written by John Mashey and not myself.

Update: It looks like it's time for John Mashey to get his own blog, since he has a lot of interesting things to say but says them on other people's blogs.

Nice Argument for Mitigation

Sheril Kirshenbaum at the Intersection has spotted an excellent, accessible and remarkably entertaining YouTube presentation arguing for vigorous mitigation.

I had seen the same fellow's earlier attempt and was dissatisfied with it on the grounds of the giant hamster defense (watch the clip for a definition). The present version takes note of this counterargument and handles it deftly.

The Co-Laureate

With all the attention going to Al Gore, I thought I'd do my bit to call attention to his co-laureate, the IPCC.

It's up on Correlations.

Update: See also Clifford Johnson's take here.